Maybe AI was never a tool

A hammer builds a house.

A calculator solves an equation.

A phone connects a call.

Each of these tools, and many more, lives distinctly outside of us, waiting to be picked up and put down. And when the task is finished, we walk away intrinsically unchanged. A hammer might cause a blister on your hand, but it doesn’t alter the way you think.

Here's the thing: Artificial intelligence (AI) doesn’t work that way. Large language models (LLMs) don’t just build, solve, or connect—they provide the curious dynamic of "iterative engagement" with us. They shape our ideas and leave traces behind in our minds. You can put down a hammer. You can’t unthink a thought an LLM gave you.

From External Utility to Internal Participation

This is the quiet revolution we’re living through. This is technology moving from external utility to internal participation. For most of history, tools extended our strength or our ability to compute and communicate. But they remained outside us and functionally disconnected. The hammer drives a nail, but it doesn’t rearrange your intention. The calculator solves for x, but it doesn’t change what x means to you.

AI is different. And it's not because it has some vitality or magical sentience, but because it functions as a cognitive environment. It is not a tool you simply pick up; it's a space you think within. When you engage an LLM, you step into a kind of "synthetic language-space" that offers cold probabilities served up in the context of linguistic theater. What emerges is something that is more than just transactional, but a context that you cognitively inhabit.

I think this framing matters, and perhaps is even essential, because it changes the type of risk we face. With a hammer, harm is external and obvious, like a bent nail, a bruised thumb. In this cognitive environment, harm can be real and insidiously subtle. Once an LLM has offered a line of reasoning or even a clever turn of phrase, it becomes part of your mental terrain. You don’t just receive information; you adopt it as a starting point for your next thought. And that's what makes AI something other than just a tool...

Certainly, this is powerful, even exhilarating. The environment can change your cognitive perspective and trajectory. But it also carries a hidden cost or even accumulates a type of debt. It can smooth away the very frictions that make human thought generative. Confusion, hesitation, and error are not accidents of cognition—they are the mechanisms by which we refine our understanding. They are what turn information into meaning.

A Kind of Counterfeit Cognition

When LLMs offer solutions on demand, they risk short-circuiting this process. They can deliver conclusions that feel complete but skip the struggle that gives thought its humanity. This is what I call anti-intelligence—not stupidity, but perhaps better expressed as a kind of counterfeit cognition. It's intelligence without friction that results in output—built in that shared cognitive dynamic—that looks like insight but has bypassed the work that makes insight truly yours.

And because this process is invisible, it is easy to miss. You know when you bang your finger with a hammer. But you rarely notice when AI has quietly shifted your reasoning. The danger is not misuse, but over-integration. And it's interesting that we often see this "integration" as an essential tech strategy driving humanity toward ill-defined goals of both artificial general intelligence and abundance. Maybe this is the essential question to be. Maybe we need to consider how this integration can result in the messy amalgamation of man and machine, and if that's the true sparkle of innovation.

This is why we may need a new vocabulary for what AI is. “Use it responsibly” assumes it is just another tool, waiting patiently on the bench. But AI is not a tool. It's a synthetic space or even a cognitive terrain that we are already walking through. The challenge is to stay awake and aware and to recognize which parts of our ideas are human, which are machine-generated, and where the two have fused into something, for lack of a better word, novel.

You can put down a hammer.

You can’t unthink a thought an LLM gave you.